Searching for grants for women in business returns a lot of articles listing programs that closed years ago. Here is the position as at 27 July 2026, checked against the agencies that administer the programs rather than against aggregator pages.
The federal picture
The Boosting Female Founders Initiative is closed. Both Round 2 and Round 3 are shown as closed to applications, and no further round has been announced. Round 2's page still carries older text suggesting future rounds will be available, which is one reason the program keeps reappearing in listicles as though it were live.
More tellingly: filter the Australian Government's own grants finder to support for women in business and it currently returns no results at all.
New South Wales
- 2026/27 Investing in Women opened on 17 February 2026 and closed on 13 March 2026.
- Supporting Women in Business ran a closed, invitation-only round from 13 October to 10 November 2025, for organisations rather than individual businesses.
- Women in Business NSW is open, but it is a fully subsidised TAFE NSW training program, not a cash grant. Worth a look if capability rather than capital is your constraint.
Queensland
The Female Founders Co-Investment Fund is the one genuinely women-specific funding offer currently available. It is a co-investment structure tied to a pre-seed or seed capital raise rather than a straightforward grant, so it suits a fairly narrow group of businesses.
A trap worth knowing about
While checking this, a federal aggregator page still presented the NSW Investing in Women round as open, months after the NSW Government's own page recorded it as closed. Aggregators lag the agencies that run the programs. Always finish your check on the administering agency's page.
What to do instead
- Apply for the general programs. Most business grants are not gender-specific, and that pool is far larger.
- Set alerts on the official finders rather than watching blog round-ups.
- When a women-specific round does open, prepare early. These rounds are usually short, and the evidence they ask for takes longer to gather than the writing does.